You are not alone in needing to rest, in feeling depleted, or in questioning if the pace you are moving at is nourishing the deeper life you are called to embody. Rest is more than a reset. It is a profound restorative practice that we can lean on and turn toward to access our innate compassion, wisdom, and healing.
Permission to Rest is a compassionate call to action. It is an invitation for you to pause, look inward, learn to feel your own rhythms, and value rest as a deeply healing, empowering, and spiritual way of life. This book is a revolutionary reminder that we have the power to transform our lives, our communities, and our planet from the inside out.
What Rest Is
Rest is relief for our dysregulated and traumatized nervous systems. Rest is an anchor during life’s most challenging storms. Rest realigns us with what was forgotten, within our own bodies and within our own lineages. Rest allows us to remember who we are, to experience our wholeness. Rest is a rhythm we can surrender into. Rest is nourishment for the weariness we carry just below the surface, and it’s a remedy for revolutionizing the ways that we live, play, work, connect, and engage with life.
When we choose to slow down and rest, we open ourselves up to energy renewal and increasing clarity of consciousness. That is, we become more available for life. The practice of rest not only restores our weary bodies and minds, but it also unblocks our hearts, allowing us to savor the gifts of daily life. Rest reminds us that we are not meant to be stagnant, that there is always an opportunity to evolve and change if we’re willing to pause and join the rhythm of our own breath.
Our Struggle
Among the biggest obstacles to developing a rest practice are the limiting beliefs that keep us from resting. You might be thinking, “I don’t have time to rest!” This is a great example of a limiting belief, something that you believe as the absolute truth, that blocks you from making necessary changes in your life. These kinds of beliefs can be conscious or unconscious, and many of them at some point perhaps helped you survive. Yet when it comes to rest, they aim to protect us from the fear of the struggle, pain, and failure that might surface when we slow down.
While it might seem like limiting beliefs are bad for us and we should focus on trying to eradicate them from our psyches. Ashley instead likes to reframe limiting beliefs as a portal, a way to know ourselves and our fears. Through this lens, they offer us an opportunity to change and a path toward rest. The key with limiting beliefs is to practice bringing those that are unconscious up to the surface. Once you are aware of them, it is much easier to have choices about them. When we’re unaware that we carry a specific belief, the choices we make around rest are restricted to whatever that belief holds true. This can make it challenging to rest.
There are many ways to identify limiting beliefs. One of the simplest ways is to just notice the thoughts in your head, the stories you tell yourself about why you don’t have time to rest. They can be extremely cunning and convincing, so identifying limiting beliefs becomes very important. Another way to practice bringing consciousness to your limiting beliefs is to pay attention to the voices in your head, especially those that tell you what you cannot do, be, or have in your life.
Reclaiming Our Rhythms
Have you ever had the experience of driving into a forest or desert and feeling how your body responds to the shift? Take a moment to recall that experience and notice what happens in your body. What are you aware of now? What is present?
There are powerful influences of speed at play in our lives, and we’re not always conscious of them. The rushed pace is all around us, like the air we breathe, and often, without recognizing it, we sync ourselves to its hurried flow. To find a slower tempo, we need to bring our attention toward our inherent tendency to follow the fast flow that dominates our society. As we become more in tune with how our histories, culture, and biology influence our pace, we gain the ability to choose for ourselves a rhythm that is restful and regenerative.
Take a moment right now to consider some of the ways that the speed of our culture has taken over your innate ability to regulate your own rhythm and live a more balanced life. What happens when you drive on the freeway? What do you notice when you are bombarded with information on your screen or text notifications? What do you feel in your body when you think about trying to slow down while living in a society that will do anything to speed you back up?
The Power of the Pause
Pausing is taking a mini rest because it’s not always an option to take twenty minutes to ourselves or, for example, get outside when we might really need to. It’s important that we have a rest practice in our pocket to apply in moments when we feel swamped or checked out. Pausing when we’re feeling dysregulated gives us an opportunity to reorient to what’s actually happening in the moment. Pausing interrupts the cycles of hyperarousal and hypoarousal by giving the nervous system a reprieve from habitual patterns, granting us agency in our ventral vagal system to make a different choice in a moment.
For instance, you might be flying with anxiety, call a pause for yourself, and in that space of the pause recall some of the self-regulation practices to ground yourself in the present (counting your breaths, calling a friend, taking a hot shower, and so on). On the flip side you could notice that you’re feeling stuck in fear, call a pause for yourself, and in that window remember that you want to feel your aliveness. In this example you might acknowledge your relative safety in the moment, go for a walk, and spend time with animals. Pausing gives us access to shifting our states through taking a beat in a moment and reorienting ourselves to our resources. In this essential pause we bring our attention to the now and move toward responding to life instead of reacting out of old habits and patterns.
Boundaries
At their core, boundaries are the limits that help us define our identity. They create the space between us and others. They give us an opportunity to know ourselves and feel ourselves in our relationships. Boundaries are often taught as barriers because so many of us have suffered from trauma and have legitimate needs to protect ourselves from our histories as well as in present time. Boundaries are meant to be flexible and adaptive to the world around us.
Because rest is not an indulgence, it is a must-have, we need to practice establishing boundaries in our lives when it comes to our restoration. On many levels we already know we need rest, yet in the same breath it can be challenging to say no to something like helping a friend, volunteering our time, or putting in a few extra hours at work. It’s often difficult to say no because so much genuinely needs our attention in a day, week, or month. Yet there will always be things that need our attention and we cannot always put them before our own need to rest. We must be willing to put rest before the majority of what demands our time and attention.
If our boundaries are undefined or nonexistent, we need to begin the practice of establishing them. Without these limits, we are more inclined to forgo our need to rest and continue saying yes to activities, relationships, and work that is potentially stressful and depleting. It’s key that we understand that each time we say yes to something or someone when it’s really a no, it drains our energy. Over time, this can lead to feeling burned-out, resentful, or miserable.
Track Satisfaction
Because we often march to the beat of a culture that is moving too fast for us, satisfaction can seem like a pipe dream, totally out of reach. We need to develop our ability to discern when we are satisfied, as our always-on culture perpetuates the belief that we aren’t whole, deserving of love, or worthy of rest. But we are whole. We are deserving of love. We are worthy of rest.
Satisfaction is a summons to develop this essential discernment. The practice itself is simple but not necessarily easy. Take a moment right now to think about the last time you felt satisfied, like, really fulfilled. Was it recently? A while back? Are you unsure?
One of the main ways we keep ourselves from making progress toward a more rested life is through the faulty thinking that everything we do, every action we take, must produce a massive shift. If it’s not big and bold, we tend to discount it and then redouble our efforts or give up completely.
This is exacerbated by social media, in that we’re just seeing the highlight reels of someone’s life. While our culture is obsessed with the idea of unicorns and overnight fame, Tracking Satisfaction is an invitation to notice in much smaller increments, to focus beyond the highlights. It’s an invitation to look at the ways we are working slowly and steadily toward the new patterns we want to establish and the rested life we long to feel held by.